Scan 98
The violin & its story : or the history & construction of the violin, 1905
8 lines. Read by computer on 29 September 2026. Printed page 82. See the scan on archive.org.
1altogether apart from the fact that such unequal pressure on the belly would quite ruin any instrument, the tone of the G string under such circumstances would hardly be a musical tone at all.
3No evidence as to the effect of the length of a string upon its pitch is more easily obtainable than to watch a violin player; his left hand is in constant motion, passing along the strings on the finger-board and back again, according to whether he wants to play a high or low note.
5Every alteration in the weight, the elasticity, or the length of a string, has a corresponding effect upon its pitch. Mersenne, in the seventeenth century, first determined the relation of each of these three elements to the movements of a string, and their respective effects in fixing its vibration number. Pythagoras knew, ages before Mersenne's time, that by lightly stopping a string at half its length it gave the octave of its open sound, and that by stopping it at one third of its length it gave a note an octave and a fifth above its open sound; but the French philosopher found that the vibration number of the string was doubled when it was stopped in the middle, and trebled when it was stopped at one third of its length. In other words, the vibration number of a string increases in proportion as its length is diminished.
7This brings us to the fact that stringed instruments, in addition to the tones obtained by the free vibration of their strings by bowing and stopping, possess a still higher register of tones called Harmonics. The player who desires to play the E a double octave above the tone of his open E string, stops that string lightly with his finger (without pressing the string on the finger board) at one quarter of its length, and gives the string a light but firm stroke with his bow, at one-eighth of the length of the string from the bridge. By similar light fingering in other positions, various harmonics may be produced, as shown in the following table:—
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